Forty-Eighters
The Forty-Eighters were political refugees from the failed democratic revolutions of 1848-1849 in Germany. Realizing that true popular reform would never take root after the crushing of those revolutions and aware of the danger posed to their persons and careers by remaining in Germanspeaking Europe, Carl Schurz, Franz Sigel, Friedrich Hecker, and most of the other civilian and military leaders of the democratic forces emigrated to other countries.
Many originally chose Switzerland or England, but by the mid-1850s nearly all the prominent Forty-Eighters had settled in the United States, attracted by its republican government, endless supply of jobs and natural resources, and already sizable German immigrant population. Numbering no more than perhaps a few thousand, these erstwhile revolutionaries strove to ensure in their adopted homeland what had failed in their old one: the triumph of personal freedom, democratic government, and true equality among citizens. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the Forty-Eighters exerted considerable political and social influence over their fellow German Americans, particularly in the Midwest, but also significantly influenced the course of American political fortunes in general. Their importance in the creation and evolution of the Republican Party was especially noteworthy and remained their most enduring legacy.Upon arriving in the United States, most Forty-Eighters took whatever jobs were available to them in either the port city they entered or their immediate destination. Nearly all of these men were educated in German universities and infused with the spirit of liberalism, but the exigencies of simply making a living in their new home forced many of them to temporarily set aside their intellectual and political aspirations. Franz Sigel, for instance, taught school in St.
Louis for several years, and Friedrich Hecker tried his hand as a farmer in Illinois. But men such as these found themselves easily frustrated by the day-to-day routine and quickly sought out the company of other like-minded immigrants in more invigorating venues. In the larger cities, Forty-Eighters quickly assumed control of the more prominent German societies, such as the Turnverein (Turner Societies), Liederkranz (Singing Society), and Deutsche Gesellschaft (German Society), and began to take over the leadership of the German American press. They were not always welcome in these efforts; in the 1850s the Forty-Eighters, derisively called the “Greens” by the 1830s- era immigrants, whom they in turn labeled the “Grays,” contended with German speakers from earlier immigration periods for leadership of the German American communities. The Forty-Eighters’ zealous belief structure, including agnosticism, abolitionism, and various societal reforms, often conflicted with the more conservative—and Americanized—values of earlier German immigrants, such as the Grays. Especially in the eastern cities of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, the more liberal Forty-Eighters were forced either to compromise their heretofore radical beliefs with those of the conservative Germans or move elsewhere where their beliefs were more welcome. The midwestern cities of St. Louis and Chicago quickly became havens for the more outspoken among them, and by the time of the Civil War, it was apparent that the Forty-Eighter-dominated midwestern German enclaves were more radical politically than the “Little Germanies” in the East, sustaining even those who advocated socialism and communism.Forty-Eighters such as Schurz quickly gravitated to the Whig Party, which in the early 1850s represented the spirit of reform in the United States. But as the Whig Party disintegrated over the slavery controversy in the mid- to late 1850s, the Forty- Eighters coalesced almost to a person behind the nascent Republican Party.
In the Republicans the German Forty-Eighters saw the political embodiment of most of the ideals they had fought for back in Europe: economic freedom, empowerment of the average citizen, resistance to aristocratic pretensions (in Republican parlance, the “slaveocracy” of the South), and a hatred of African slavery and the society it had spawned. For the German Forty-Eighter, slavery was especially odious; it represented a threat to immigrant labor should it expand westward into the territories, provided for the existence of an aristocratic planter class, and simply repudiated the ideal of human freedom. No wonder that nearly all Forty-Eighter newspaper editors converted their papers into organs of the Republican Party and campaigned assiduously for it in the national elections of 1856 and 1860.Whether or not the Forty-Eighters were successful in converting their fellow German Americans into Republicans is a weighty question, but most historians now believe that the elemental differences between the former revolutionaries and immigrants who arrived earlier in the United States were enough to keep a high percentage of average German immigrants from voting Republican. Additionally, older immigrants tended to be Democrats and preferred the security of the party that had traditionally welcomed and protected immigrants to the new and boisterous Republican Party, which had taints of na- tivism and temperance, two issues that consistently frightened immigrants in the nineteenth century. It now appears that the famous “Myth of 1860”—that the German Americans, led by their Forty-Eighter leaders, voted en masse for Abraham Lincoln and secured his election—was indeed nothing more than a myth. But there is little doubt that the Forty-Eighters were instrumental in the creation and growth of the Republican Party in several key states, especially Wisconsin (where Schurz actively campaigned), Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri. During the Civil War and afterward, Forty-Eighter Republicans succeeded in toning down the stigmas of temperance and nativism in their party and thus drew thousands of German American voters away from the Democrats and behind the banner of Lincoln.
Forty-Eighters, by virtue of their leadership status in German American social, cultural, and political life, quickly became involved in the Civil War on the Union side. For them, the secession of the southern states was nothing more than an illegal, traitorous act by slaveholding aristocrats who wished not only to continue the enslavement of the black race but also sought the virtual enslavement of free laborers, including immigrants. Friedrich Hecker, Franz Sigel, Ludwig Blenker, Alexander Schimmelpfennig, Augustus Willich, and a host of others who had seen military service in Europe enthusiastically formed ethnically German regiments in 1861—1862 and offered them, with themselves and like-minded friends as officers, to the federal service. Because these regiments were composed not only of Forty-Eighters and Republicans but also contained Democratic Germans and those opposed to Forty-Eighter dominance, however, intraethnic squabbling often handicapped their leadership. Moreover, the Anglo- American Republican leadership in Washington felt obliged to the Forty-Eighters for their help in the recent election and frequently commissioned pure politicians, such as Schurz, as colonels and generals in the Union army. The record of Forty- Eighter military leadership in the Civil War was therefore a mixed one. Sigel, for all his experience as a commander of the rebellious Democratic forces in 1848-1849, clearly underperformed at the battles of Wilsons Creek in 1861 and New Market in 1864 and managed to resign his command of the strongly German American 11 Corps, due to a piqued ego, on the eve of the Battle of Chancellorsville. Ludwig Blenker, one-time commander of an entire division of ethnically German regiments in the East, embroiled himself in political controversies with colonels under his command as well as his commander in chief, George B. McClellan, and was even accused by other Germans of indulging in extravagant luxuries while in camp. Schurz, for having no previous military experience, fared reasonably well, despite being blamed for the Union defeat at Chancellorsville in 1863, and compiled an honorable record by the end of the war.
Alexander Schim- melpfennig, Augustus Willich, and Peter Osterhaus were all promoted to high command by the end of the war, the latter two playing critical roles in the final campaigns of the western theater of operations, including Sherman’s March to the Sea.After the war, Forty-Eighters resumed many of their positions of civilian leadership among the German American communities and in the Republican Party. They continued to exert a noticeable influence in national politics, especially in the later 1870s when the liberal Republicans temporarily bolted from the Republican Party out of dissatisfaction with Reconstruction in the South, among other issues. Schurz vehemently decried the abandonment of radical Reconstruction policies, particularly those that left blacks at the mercy of their former masters. In the fields of education, business, and the arts, Forty-Eighters made viable contributions to their new homeland by introducing and popularizing the kindergarten; founding private academies and supporting both German- and English-language schools; establishing the most successful (and most long-lived) breweries, piano factories, and German-language newspapers; and publishing hundreds of volumes of books on subjects as diverse as history, medicine, physics, and German literature.
A few, such as Friedrich Kapp, returned to Germany after spending several years in the United States, but even he and other reverse-emigres agreed that German Americans would ultimately have to acculturate and amalgamate with the greater Anglo- American population. One of the last major contributions of the Forty-Eighters was their almost unilateral insistence, expressed in countless books, newspapers, and speeches, on the necessity of German immigrants becoming Americanized and blending their unique talents and gifts with those of other American citizens. Even in this philosophical crusade the Forty-Eighters were opposed by members of their own ethnic group, but in the end their prophecy triumphed.
Christian B. Keller
See also American Civil War, German Participants in; Griesinger, Karl Theodor; Hecker, Friedrich; Kapp, Friedrich; Kindergartners; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Osterhaus, Peter J.; Schimmelpfennig, Alexander; Schurz, Carl; Sigel, Franz; Verein; Willich, August (von)
References and Further Reading
Brancaforte, Charlotte, ed. The German Forty- Eighters in the United States. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
Hochbruck, Wolfgang, Ulrich Bachteler, and Henning Zimmermann, eds. Achtundvierziger/Forty-Eighters: Die Deutsche Revolution von 1848/49, die Vereinigten Staaten und der Amerikanische Buergerkrieg. Muenster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot, 2000.
Miller, Randall M., ed. Germans in America: Retrospect and Prospect. Philadelphia: German Society of Pennsylvania, 1984.
Wittke, Carl. Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952.
Zucker, A. E., ed. The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848. New York: Columbia University Press, 1950.